Election temptation – should Leo stay or should he go?
IT IS very hard to see this young year of 2018 going off the calendar without a Dáil election. That gut feeling, about the gut business that is politics, was given a further gee-up yesterday with more positive poll figures for the Taoiseach. ‘Camp Leo’ is at once a happier, yet more twitchy, place to be right now.
The ‘Sunday Independent’ poll put Fine Gael up at 36pc – the same ranking which delivered it a historic victory in February 2011.
People of a certain age can easily evoke the rhythms of The Clash’s epic song ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’.
Time and place, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and his team can do no wrong just now. That Kantar Millward Brown survey for our sister paper was replete with good news for them.
The more seasoned ones among them know it will not always be thus and that “timing” is a key political watchword.
His party is eight points ahead of the “auld enemy”, Fianna Fáil, which is on 28pc. This trend, reflected in other similar surveys in recent months, will add to the angst with the TDs and senators of that “half-in/half-out-of-Government party”.
Like most of the rest of us, Micheál Martin’s followers are trying to make sense of this hung Dáil and ‘new politics’. It is just that they have a more existential interest in this scenario than many of the rest of us.
Fianna Fáil is seeing clear evidence of what it feared after Enda Kenny’s overdue exit last summer, and the ensuing Fine Gael leadership contest.
Mr Varadkar is proving to be a far more formidable adversary than Mr Kenny and he is getting the bounce of the ball in an international economic upswing and in the way – so far – Brexit talks are going.
There continues to be a clear ‘Leo bounce’. The strident tone he struck on Brexit since taking office last June is clearly a boon.
The other indicators are often less reliable, but they are encouragingly positive for our youngest ever Taoiseach.
Half the people are happy with the Government performance, or perhaps more accurately, the way Ireland caught the tide of the international upswing.
It must be gratifying for Mr Varadkar to see six out of 10 people giving him a positive personal rating. He is a good 10 points ahead of Mr Martin, with whom he is destined to fight a presidential-style election battle soon. We must note that while this survey finding is gratifying – it is also rather fickle.
So, what should the bould Leo do? Cash these political credits before they pass their best-before date? Or, bide his time and play a slightly longer game?
The political agenda through the first half of the year is already heavily dominated by the promised referendum on the Eighth Amendment. The ‘Sunday Independent’ poll does not unduly surprise on this issue as it tells us it is shaping up to be a very close-run thing.
Almost half the nation appears ready to back the prospect of an unlimited abortion regime up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. But this debate has yet to even begin, and on-infive voters has yet to decide where they stand.
Now, historically these big moral-dilemma referendum votes have had little or no influence in subsequent Dáil elections. Recent examples were the Labour Party driving home same-sex marriage in May 2015, and then getting slaughtered in the February 2016 General Election.
And back in March 2002, Bertie Ahern’s abortion referendum narrowly failed, only to see him romp home in the General Election two months later.
That said, if Mr Varadkar was placed after this summer to claim a key role in resolving Ireland’s 35-year abortion crux, there would be a certain political dividend. This prospect and other factors bring us back to general election speculation centring around October.
The making of a budget offers up to a dozen credible reasons for a break in this arrangement whereby Fianna Fáil continues to prop up this minority Government.
BUT October 2018 is also billed as the decisive time for the Brexit negotiations, with the EU insisting a draft deal must be cut by Halloween if it is to be ratified in time for the EU-UK divorce date of March 29, 2019. How that Brexit ball will bounce for all of us cannot be predicted by anyone.
So, some of Mr Varadkar’s counsellors will warn the only way from here is downwards in the popularity rankings. There will be calls for an earlier exit. Cutting and running in politics is a perilous business and hard to get right.
Thus political careers and reputations are made or broken.
Poll trends evoke the old Clash number for the Taoiseach: ‘Should I stay or should I go?’